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i'm a base 12 maxi myself. much more utility for everyday use with the thirds in the mix. this was why the old european money and measurement systems were based on 12. the babylonians and other ancients used base 60, which is even more precise, its lowest common factors are 1, 2, 3 and 5, base 12 is 1, 2, 3 and base 10, which i consider to be the Roman base, is 1 2 and 5

i don't know why the romans decided on this scheme tho. but it didn't stick in europe until the french made metric, which is based on the roman system.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 5mo ago

i think probably the romans decided on 1, 2 and 5 because it is probably quite efficient for numbers of characters to write numbers. 1s are half the width of the rest of the ciphers they use, so 3 and 8 are the longest single digit arabic numbers with III and VIII and they made a scheme where the less-than-next cipher could be represented by a prefix like IX for 9 or IL for 40

although there was some variance with those schemes, XXXX and IIII were sometimes used.

since they didn't have any kind of movable type i can only speculate that they were comparing its efficiency to tallies which are based on 1 and 5.

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ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 5mo ago

also probably due to the fact that they used it with signage which was mostly carved into stone. arabic was painted, so the arabic numbers are cursive style.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴏꜰ ᴍʟᴇᴋᴜ 5mo ago

number writing systems are probably my second most intense obsession after text writing systems. i never actually got around to learning to write numbers in ancient greek but they had a whole scheme for it as well. and could write quite big numbers.

the arabs were the most elegant with their base 10 decimal number system though. they had fractions and were the first historically recorded culture to get close to a precise approximation of pi. the greeks were into that math stuff as well but their scheme was a bit confusing since it reused the alphabet.